Guess what? iPhone 2.0 supports Hebrew! July 11, 2008
Posted by jay in : iPhone , trackback
I was not sure whether I should upgrade or not. I thought of waiting until the jailbreak app will be released by the iPhone Dev Team so I won’t loose the applications I have installed using the “Installer”, and most important, the Hebrew support. Note: I am an AT&T subscriber so I did not use Jailbreak to activate the phone to work with a different carrier.
But the sync issues that I have had for months between Entourage –> iCal / AddressBook –> iTunes –> iPhone (not being able to sync AddressBook, having duplicate contacts, Inbox not in sync, etc.), is what pushed me to upgrade.
So, I upgraded last night to iPhone 2.0 and was very happy to see that setting up Exchange and getting Push to work was super easy. Minutes later, after the first sync process, the Inbox, AddressBook and Calendar were in complete sync with Exchange without any conflict/merge warnings. And my biggest surprise was that the iPhone has a partial Hebrew support!
Apparently, even though Apple did not officially add Hebrew support to iPhone, the fonts that I installed in the past still work. Yes, it is not 100% perfect and there are some issues - the Hebrew keyboard is gone (but I hardly used it), the labels inside Contacts and iPod are displayed left to right, email previews are displayed left to right as well (so you have to open the email and then it renders right to left), but being able to read Hebrew websites and emails is good enough for me.
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Couple of additional tips and comments after a few hours of usage:
1. iPhone 2.0 has a built in screen capture utility.
2. Twittelator is a pretty good free twitter client. A perfect replacement to the popular Twinkle.
3. I am missing the good old “Services” which allows to easily turn on/off Wifi, Bluetooth and Edge. Does anyone know of a replacement? I could not find one in the AppStore.
4. The NYTimes app already has ads integrated (nicely done), but it is missing important features such as sharing (email, bookmark).
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My own conclusion: No need to buy a new 3G iPhone since I am around Wifi most of the day, and no need to jailbreak since I found good apps to replace old ones and I have Hebrew fonts.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Thanks for that.
Could you see if any of the ebook readers support hebrew.
July 14th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
I have never used an eBook reader app on my iPhone.
July 18th, 2008 at 8:31 am
[...] Browsing the Internet. According to Jay Meydad’s blog, the iPhone 2.0 supports Hebrew. This means that you can visit Hebrew websites and the Hebrew will [...]
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:04 am
Nice and informative information
i just got the 3g and love the fact that i can read Emails and websites in Hebrew.
The one thing i need is a Hebrew keyboard so i will be able to send emails.
Does any one know how to get it with out jailbraking ?
August 3rd, 2008 at 11:48 pm
As far as I know this is not supported in iPhone 2.0. Also, there is no official app for Heb keyboard. You will have to jail break.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:50 am
I bought a new iPhone 3G and it supports Hebrew. Apparently iPhone 2.0 has it built-in and it doesn’t have anything to do with what you installed earlier (indeed, when you upgrade it erases everything you have on the phone anyway).
August 12th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Jon,
Totally makes sense that the Heb fonts are part of the 2.0 firmware and have nothing to do with previous installs.
I thought it was not officially supported by Apple for two reasons:
a. it was not documented anywhere in the release notes
b. It was released partially broken (as I wrote above - labels in different apps are displayed left to right)